Ernest Hemingway Quotes
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To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it's over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that's rare. That's rare and valuable.
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The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.
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Love is something that hangs up behind the bathroom door and smells of Lysol.
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My life used to be full of everything. Now if you aren't with me I haven't a thing in the world.
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I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior FBI-men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep-hole and missing laundry list school. ... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.
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The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.
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The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.
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As a writer, you should not judge, you should understand.
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Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.
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It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
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Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
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Those who say they want to be writers, and aren’t writing, don’t.
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I kissed her hard and held her tight and tried to open her lips; they were closed tight.
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You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
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Creation's probably overrated. After all, God made the world in only six days and rested on the seventh.
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When I had finished the book I knew that no matter what Scott did, nor how he behaved, I must know it was like a sickness and be of any help I could to him and try to be a good friend. He had many good, good friends, more than anyone I knew. But I enlisted as one more, whether I could be of any use to him or not. If he could write a book as fine as The Great Gatsby I was sure that he could write an even better one. I did not know Zelda yet, and so I did not know the terrible odds that were against him. But we were to find them out soon enough.
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As in no other form of lute or combat, the conditions are such; the winner takes nothing, neither his ease, nor his pleasure, nor any notion of glory, nor if he wins far enough, will he find anything within himself.
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It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.
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Everybody has something wrong with them.
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It is impossible to believe the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure, classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped over a stick.
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Find the best writers, pay them to write, and avoid typos at all costs.
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You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.
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You are all a lost generation. [with credit to Gertrude Stein]
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God knows, people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature.